What of the milk they nuzzled at birth,
and prior to that, what of water and blood?
What of the debris-spattered windshield,
the tunnel wide enough for only one?
What of the minerals gummed with salt and mud,
nourishing dark mixed of earth and flint?
What of the aster and the amaranth, then tiny buds
of forget-me-nots stripped from the field?
What of the year’s deepening light pooled in
the eyelids, a glaze the shade of pomegranates?
And what of the flanks of animals stepping through winter
wheat; then shadows of antlers crossed with the honeylocust’s?
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Listening to Piazzolla’s Tango Etudes
- Eating Dried Fish With Our Hands
- Encore
- Dear nostalgia,
- What We Look For
- Without Translation
- Heart Weighted With Cares
- Fables
- Tableaux Vivants
- Listening to Chopin’s Prelude in D-flat Major, Op. 28, No. 15
- Fountains
- Dear solitude,
- Nocturne
- Frontispiece
- Landscape, with Notes of Red
- Blue Stone Blues
- Landscape, with a Glimpse of the Soul as it Leaves the Body
- How I Came to Writing
- When does the hunger abate;
- Dear errant winds at dusk,
- Aerogramme
- Dear scarlet-flushed, hydraulic,
- Monday’s News
- Counterpoints
- Landscape, with Traces of Prior Events
- On the Nature of Things
- Spell Against Grey
- Landscape, with Castoffs on the Sidewalk
- Sleepless Ghazal
- Last Call
- Delivery Confirmation
- Landscape, with Early Frost and a Dream Interior
- Campus Elegy
- Petrichor
- Ghazal: Chimerae
- Maguindanao Ghazal
- Insurgent Song
- Paper Ghazal
- Ghazal of the Transcendental
- Hot Lyric
- On the sense of danger or foreboding, the prickling
- Postcard from the Labyrinth
- Hunger
- Debris
- Letter to One Seeking Flight
- Unbelievable Ends
- In the chapel of perpetual adoration,
- Night Rain
- Conversation that Ends with a Dream of Accounting
- Lyric on the Edge of Winter
- Paper Cut #2
- Herald
- Walking
- And once again,
- Prayer Among the Stones
- Call and Response
- Recover
- Dark Prayer
- Song of Snow
- Santa Milagrita
- Song without Strings
- Morning Song
My favorite couplets are the first two; together they would make a fine poem by themselves.
“Minerals gummed with salt and mud” is an evocative image as well. I like an image when it sparks an immediate mental picture!
I don’t know how you keep it up, Luisa! I guess daily practice makes perfect.